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At the Aronson Galleries at the New School, a wall of pickle jars taped with black-and-white cutout portraits of twenty dictators lines the windowsill. A standard 8 ½ x 11 paper sign invites visitors to Pick Your Own Dick by placing a poker chip in a jar. Chairman Mao, a world-class “dick” whose Cultural Revolution starved and murdered millions of Chinese, and Turkish President Erdogan, an elected Muslim fundamentalist morphing into a military strongman, handily won opening night.

Romancing True Power: D20, the mischievous exhibition and book designed by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss of NAO and conceived by Nina Khrushcheva, associate dean and professor of International Affairs at the New School, cheekily invites public debate about the nature of and difference between types of dictatorship, taking special glee in thumbing its nose at ostentatious symbols of power.

Jerde Partnership’s The Vermont, consisting of glassy 23 and 29-story mixed-use towers on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, opened last summer. But one of its most memorable features, LA’s Heart of Compassion, a sculpture by Cliff Garten covering the bulk of its above-ground parking structure, is only now officially open.

Last year, AN‘s Midwest Editor Chris Bentleyreported on the advances being made in wood construction and how we were on the verge of seeing tall timber towers sprout up around the world. The AEC community has been talking about building high-rise structures with wood for years, but there obviously hasn’t been a major revolution with the building type just yet—the tallest modern wood building doesn’t even top 100 feet. Well, that record is about to be shattered by a new tower in Vienna that could usher in a new era of high-rise development.

Trust is earned. To be ensconced in the files of a design firm, products must pass professional muster on many fronts: performance, aesthetics, and value, prime among them. From high-tech building materials to hand-crafted finishes, architects and designers share their favorite resources with AN.

February’s over and that means Spring is a little, tiny bit closer. But while there’s still snow on the ground here in New York, let’s take a look back at the top stories from last month as voted by you, our readers. We saw a mix of topics hit the top posts, including high-tech transport, jewelry design, Frank Gehry’s funky architecture, and a heartwarming film about growing up with architects. Take a look at the top links below.

Facades+ AM is coming to Washington, DC on March 5. (Nicolas Raymond/Flickr)

With its combination of iconic references to the nation’s past and the machinery that drives our political present, Washington, DC presents a particular set of problems and possibilities to facades innovators. Top experts in high-performance building envelope design and construction will this gather this Thursday, March 5, to explore some of these issues during Facades+ AM: Washington Three by Three, a morning seminar taking place at the District Architecture Center.

As AN has been reporting for a while now, it’s all systems go for the long-stalled Domino Sugar Factory redevelopment on the Brooklyn waterfront. Crews have been demolishing old structures on the site for months, and today we got word that the developer, Two Trees, is breaking ground on the massive project’s first residential building: a 16-story, 500-unit rental building designed by SHoP, which is designing the entire project.

A miniature LEGO model of the Lincoln Memorial has just launched under the LEGO Architecture brand, a “Lego for grownups” product line that celebrates architecture and the chameleon capabilities of the LEGO brick.